They have no wings and still glide from tree to tree: tree snakes are flying snakes. Now researchers have found out how the animals can stay in the air, messages them in the journal “Nature”. The scientists had set up a huge snake hall for the experiments.
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Flying snakes include five species of ornamental tree snakes (Chrysopelea). The delicate, slightly poisonous reptiles live in the rainforests of South and Southeast Asia and are up to a meter long. When starting from one branch, they usually push off and glide over distances of up to 20 meters before landing on another branch.
The snakes are the only vertebrates without extremities that can glide through the air. “I find them so interesting because the snake is perhaps the least obvious animal that should be able to fly through the air,” says study leader Jake Socha, who has been studying the animals for 20 years.
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“Do they do that because they are snakes and all snakes do this”?
In previous studies, Socha was able to show that the Make snakes particularly wide in flight. This makes your body look like a wing. Now the researchers investigated why the animals snake in an S-shape in flight. “Are they doing this because they are snakes and all snakes do this?” Asked the researchers, “or is there an underlying physical function of this wave motion?”
To clarify this, they built a four-story high jumping arena with padded floors and an artificial tree for landing. Then they let several ornamental tree snakes of the species Chrysopelea paradisi fly onto the tree from a height of more than eight meters. They attached reflectors to the bodies and filmed the flights with infrared cameras.
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With these pictures, they were able to recreate the meandering three-dimensionally in the computer model. The researchers found that the snakes not only meandered horizontally, but also vertically. The vertical movement is less pronounced, but it happens about twice as often as the horizontal movement.
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In gliding flight simulations, the scientists changed the frequency of the wave movements and observed the effects on the flight. Result: The flight of the simulated snake fails without wave motion because it tips over. The side meandering and the up and down movements stabilize the gliding flight.
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In a “Nature Physics” commentary, Jim Usherwood of the University of London does not rule out that the snakes could wind in the air out of habit. Nevertheless, the study shows that the way they glide in flight is more stable. “The generality of these results,” Usherwood writes, “and their possible implementation in robot snakes offer exciting opportunities for further exploration.”
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